Date Presented Accepted for AOTA INSPIRE 2021 but unable to be presented due to online event limitations.
It is important for humans to efficiently detect changes occurring around them for social interaction, learning, and movement, as well as survival and protection (Kessler, 2006). Adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder demonstrate strengths and difficulties in change detection that may affect areas of everyday participation. OTs have an important role in defining these areas, facilitating information processing to enhance adaptive responses, and developing occupational-based interventions.
Primary Author and Speaker: Michal Hochhauser
Contributing Authors: Adi Aran, Ouriel Grynszpan
PURPOSE: The study aimed to investigate the detection of changed items with central and marginal levels of interest in adolescents with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) using a change blindness experiment with eye tracking. Change blindness, a higher order process of visual attention is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it right away (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). It is guided in part by the features’ visual salience, necessary for change detection where observers must rely on their scene memory to detect what may have changed. If changes occur in areas which attract more attention (central versus marginal interest), they will tend to be detected more quickly as the latter require cognitive manipulation (Hochhauser & Grynszpan, 2017).
DESIGN: This cross-sectional study included 84 drug-naive adolescents aged 12 to 19 years; 44 ADHD (M = 14.6, SD = 2.06), 29 male and 40 TD, (M = 14,6, SD = 2.13), 22 male. Adolescents with other physical and/or neurological disabilities were excluded. ADHD participants were recruited from a neuropediatric hospital department and controls via local community centers and social media.
METHOD: Participants performed a flicker task that included 36 pairs of identical images apart from a single difference in the presence or absence of a particular object or area where changes were either of high semantic importance (central) or of low semantic importance (marginal). The task required observers to search for a change until they detected it. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) repeated measures were used to test for group differences in change detection times and error rates as well as time to first fixation (TFF) and total fixation duration (TFD) on the changed items of central and marginal interest. We also compared search modes and breadth of attention by means of scan path and gaze dispersion.
RESULTS: Change detection times of adolescents with ADHD were similar to those of typically developing adolescents as well as time to first fixation and total fixation duration on the changing item, revealing a main effect for level of interest, showing that both groups were slower to find marginal items, and looked longer at them, however ADHD demonstrated significantly greater scan areas, F (1, 82) = 5.72, p < 0.02, η2 = 0.06.
CONCLUSION: We found that while change detection time was similar in adolescents with ADHD and control, scanning was less efficient in the ADHD group. Impaired scanning might lead to higher fatigue and shorter visual attention span.
References
Hochhauser, M., & Grynszpan, O. (2017). Methods investigating how individuals with autism spectrum disorder spontaneously attend to social events. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 4(1), 82-93.
Kessler, R. C., Adler, L., Barkley, R., Biederman, J., Conners, C. K., Demler, O., ... & Spencer, T. (2006). The prevalence and correlates of adult ADHD in the United States: results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. American Journal of psychiatry, 163(4), 716-723.
Rensink, R. A., O'Regan, J. K., & Clark, J. J. (1997). To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5), 368-373.
